Random musings about the state and direction of educational technology usage in the classrooms of today.

Saturday

Thing 16 - More on Cloud Computing

Thing 16 is about online productivity tools. As I posted in the Thing 15 entry, we are seeing new ways to increase our ability to collaborate and increase our effectiveness every day.

The ZOHO.com set of products is quite extensive when it come to productivity applications. Zoho has really come in and eaten Microsoft's lunch on moving applications to the web. MS is trying to catch up, but is pretty far behind the curve right now.

Zoho has even extended some of their apps to work on web-connected mobile devices, so you can use products like Zoho writer, and notes right on your phone... and access your documents everywhere.

One concern by users is the thought of what happens when I need to work on something when not online? Well, Google has taken care of that as well. You can use Google Gears which will allow you to work on your online apps while offline and then synchronize them when you get back online. How cool is that!

All of these tools have a place in classrooms. Students can use word processing, presentation, spreadsheet and database applications anywhere they have an Internet connection. Additionally, many public Internet terminals, such as the library, can be used by our students to access their content as well, which diminished the digital divide just a bit.